January 25, 2005
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Chosen People Without a Narrative
Things I love:
- Multi-book reviews that synthesize and illuminate.
- Sweeping geo-socio-economic analyses.
- Apparently, Europe.
I am led to this conclusion by Tony Judt’s great article in The New York Review of Books. It riffs on a recent spate of books that look at Europe, the U.S., and all the blue sky between them these days.
You know the outline: Americans work 24/7; Europeans take vacations with their healthy children. America spews CO2; Europe brews coffee. While dancing.
But the thing is it’s true. There’s a parade of statistics marching behind the contention that America is the weird rural cousin in this family. Salient: “[T]he EU has 87 prisoners per 100,000 people; America has 685,” Judt notes. Eep. Erk. Glmph.
One of the books under discussion is Jeremy Rifkin’s “The European Dream,” which I gotta admit sounds a little flaky — but that’s okay; I’m a little flaky, too. And just check out this line:
With only our religious fervor to hold on to, we have become a “chosen people” without a narrative — making America potentially a more dangerous and lonely place to be.
That’s good stuff.
And man, narratives — stories and language — really are powerful. As an example, read this paragraph from Judt (which happens to be interesting in its own right):
Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. […] [P]ensions and other social provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.
Okay. Check in: Did the term “welfare state” sound shady to you, too? I always parsed it perjoratively — actually, until just now. Because couched in the context of, you know, healthy dancing Swedish children, it suddenly seemed rather appealing.
But generally, in my mind, “welfare state” carries specific connotations: The government pays the bills. Fiscal irresponsibility. Sittin’ around.
But that’s not inherent in the term, the policy, or the philosophy; rather, it’s just an association that some wily rhetoriticians have massaged into our national narrative over the last few decades.
I mean, wow. They made me mistrust the word welfare. What’s next? “Wisdom”?
Anyway. At some point we’ll need a new narrative. And some catchy new words and phrases.
And so let us look, with admiration (tempered by realism!), to Europe:
In the words of Jean-Marie Guèhenno, the UN’s director of peacekeeping operations: “Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.”
Wait, it gets better:
To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. […] As things now stand, boundary-breaking and community-making is something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else.
Boundary-breaking and community-making! Now that is something I can get behind.
Hey, has anybody actually been to Europe? Is it as cool as it sounds?
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Comments
Sweet Jesus, that is a beautiful article. I just wish I knew more about the EU. The world is so darn big...funny how the more evenings I spend on the Web these days, the more ignorant I feel, despite the fact that I am actually less ignorant...hahaha...get it? ...Uhh...right. Moving on...
I do wonder what concretely is meant by "those old frontier posts" in the last paragraph, and what exactly "transcend[ing] older boundaries" in the context of the EU entails. The student of culture in me fears such phrases the way the average American jumps at the term "welfare state," and yet the optimist in me tells me that someone, somewhere, is going to get it so right. It seems to me that the EU is in an excellent position to do so, and I'm rather curious about what they're doing. Any ideas on where to start finding out?
I also wonder why the EU always makes me think of the movie Brazil...although I suppose that's just a general fear of big government/bureaucracy, probably inspired more by the Star Wars prequels than actual reality. Anyone else suffering from this particular paranoia?
Don't miss Judt's footnotes. Some of them veer towards inanity (especially the tone-deaf quips about Janet Jackson and David Beckham), but others are juicy and delicious.
Examples:
[5] "...(T)he steadily rising cost of private medical insurance in the US puts at least as much of a burden on American firms as social taxation and welfare privileges place upon their European counterparts —- while providing none of the attendant social benefits."
[8] "... The collapsing dollar is sustained only by foreigners' willingness to hold it: Americans are currently spending other people's money on other people's products. Were the US any other country it would by now be in the unforgiving hands of the International Monetary Fund."
[16] "... (Garton Ash) cites a popular joke: Britain was promised that Blair's Third Way would bring it American universities and German prisons —- what it is actually getting are American prisons and German universities."
"Spending other people's money on other people's products." I don't know if I've ever seen a better-phrased summary of why simultaneously skyrocketing budget and trade deficits spell disaster for a country's economy.
My favorite passage, however, is the same cited by Robin, albeit for a slightly different reason:
"(T)hese are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state."
It's the "difficult policy choices with political consequences" line that resonates for me. Both Americans and Europeans today too easily place themselves (and each other) in scenarios they imagine to be both apocalyptic and inevitable. We're all hopelessly cursed by demographics and unmanageable covenants: too many immigrants, too many old people, and too many promises made, with danger (whether global terrorism or environmental and economic collapse) always just around the corner. Instead of making tough choices about adjustments to the system -- politically unpopular, perhaps, but functionally necessary -- both American and European leaders have consigned blame to other quarters and contented themselves with either radically razing the system or going down with the ship, like Ahab bound to the mast.
This is more than the politics of fear -- it's a kind of insanity. What we need are a thousand cool heads -- debunkers who can show us a third way out.
being in a house with 40 of my italian family members is a microcosm of europe. b-CUZ, when i was in europe i would have felt the same way, if i had just looked through one of those dusty 500 yr old. windows in venice. heck, yes, europe is cool, it is different than the US, after all. we brew coffee, here, but it's so... new. the forever-old-ness of those countries is unavoidable. it soaks into everything. even a brand new starbucks on the corner of san marco square. hmm, i don't know.
(Ali Pia! Your voice has been absent from this blog for too long!)
heheee.. i'm still here. trying not to lurk. trying to think of something of worth(lessness) to say. !! keep on keeping it up ro!
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